Browsed byTag: chronic pain

Every New Year I find myself thinking about a previous New Year’s Eve, one that’s barely a fragment of memory: sitting in my kitchen as my uncle and grandad, sitting near the radiator, turned to each other, and said, “Well, well, well. 2002.” At this point I’m not even sure if it’s a real memory, but it’s one I’ve gone over so many times in my head that it feels like one. 2018’s been quite a year. Politically tumultuous, to…

Yikes. I’d just got back on the blogging wagon, and then I fell off it again. I’m sorry for my extended silence. I haven’t been doing brilliantly the last few weeks — I’ve had some bad pain flare-ups, along with the migraines I’ve been suffering for the last couple of months, and am barely finding time to do anything. Where I do have any time, I’m tending to use it to work on Bard, which means I’ve been reading very…

Working three days a week means that technically speaking, I have more days off work than days at work. Despite this, I still feel an enormous sense of pressure to get things done on those days off — to hit writing targets, take photos for instagram, write blog posts, run errands, do dance practice… All the things I don’t have the time or energy to do on work days. This is not inherently a problem. I’m pretty sure this kind…

At the start of my final year of university, people often asked me about my plans for life after graduation. At that point, my answer was that I intended to work part-time and live at home, saving money if I could, with a somewhat nebulous idea of what was going to follow after that. My intention to work part time was mostly born of the realisation that my pain and fatigue making working full time difficult if not impossible. During…

I don’t know whether you guys are familiar with the concept of studyspo, but I come across it quite a lot, on both Tumblr and Instagram. Both platforms have their own studyspo communities (studyblr and #studygram respectively) of people who post aesthetic pictures of their notes and schoolwork to inspire and motivate others to study — as well as to celebrate their own progress, of course. There are some particular hallmarks of the kind of things people tend to post,…

Deciding to return to Irish dance was a risky proposition, for me. I had no idea how my body would react — whether it would make my chronic pain better or worse, cause injury or allow me to get stronger. But it was also risky on more than a physical level. When I started considering going back to Irish dance, I found myself suddenly full of wildly ambitious plans and dreams, such as I haven’t had for years. My health…

Wow, sorry for abruptly disappearing from the blog for nearly three weeks. I was doing a lot better on the ‘regularly posting’ thing, and then… well, life happened. Firstly, I got the flu, which was miserable. Also, my immune system is completely useless, so it lasted way too long — I spent several days unable to get out of bed, but still had a horrible chesty cough a week and a half later. The fatigue it caused was also pretty…

Around this time last year, I wrote a post about how my health has got in the way of having dreams and being ambitious, and how I’m more aware of my limitations than of my aspirations. My goal was to try and make 2017 a year of remembering how to dream again, how to be ambitious even when it seems unlikely. It’s hard to assess the extent to which I’ve succeeded at that goal. Right now, I am painfully aware…

My dissertation writing retreat was both everything I hoped, and also not. Spending five days in Cambridge on my own was what I needed: I managed to write around 9,500 words of my dissertation, which puts me over the minimum wordcount and essentially constitutes most of a first draft. I’d hoped, however, that it would be in a state where I could send it to my supervisor at the end of the week. Instead, it’s a hastily cobbled-together mess of…

I hit 50k for NaNoWriMo on the 11th November. I didn’t say much at the time because I still have a long way to go before I finish the book and, for me, hitting 50k is not especially remarkable. It wasn’t my fastest year (2013 only took me three days), but also wasn’t my slowest (last year I hit 50k on on Day 26). It felt like an achievement, but in many ways one I only managed by virtue of…